An Interview with Jonathan Coe

from the book From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction, edited by Sally Bayley and William May (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)

Did you experiment with different ways of structuring your BS Johnson biography in the writing process? Did you ever envision a more traditional approach?

- Yes, the final structure of the book did not occur to me until pretty late in the process. I suppose I had written about a quarter of the book in a more ‘traditional’ biographical form, and was conscious that the writing was a bit leaden and the whole thing was not flickering into any kind of life. It wasn’t so much a question of ‘experimenting with different ways’ – more a kind of intuitive sense that I hadn’t succeeded in hacking a clear narrative path through all that dense material, a path that readers could easily follow. Once I had seen it in those terms, I realised that writing a biography (or this biography) was formally not so very different from writing a novel, and at that point the writing become much easier and more fluid. That was also when I decided to subtitle it “The Story of B S Johnson”.

In the biography, you attack the modern “scrutiny and interrogation of writers’ lives” and suggest that literary biography has helped ensure that “literature is discussed more than ever before, yet at the same time, it has never been less valued”.  Did writing the biography change your perception of literary biographies? Are there any literary biographies you particular admire?

- Yes, of course: I admire the industry and artistry you find in the biographies of Michael Holroyd, Claire Tomalin and Victoria Glendinning. Ellmann’s Joyce is an acknowledged classic; I also enjoyed James Knowlson’s Beckett biography, and Ralph Pite’s recent biography of Hardy is exemplary. I was to some extent playing devil’s advocate and adopting a B S Johnsonian extremist pose when I wrote that. At the same time, the puritan in me insists that the work is the thing. I suppose I can understand the impulse, when you have fallen in love with a writer and read everything available by him/her, to supplement that reading by reading their biography. What alarms me is that many readers now seem to know and care more about some writers’ lives than they do about their work: Iris Murdoch and Sylvia Plath being two obvious examples.

A good deal of historical research goes into your novels. Given the sense of responsibility you felt being B.S. Johnson’s biographer, do you feel any comparable responsibility in representing historical events in your novels e.g. the IRA bombing or the Iraq war? Did you feel a greater sense of responsibility in representing these events having completed the biography?

- Of course the sense of responsibility in representing historial events in fiction is just as strong; and no, it hasn’t got noticeably stronger since I wrote the biography. The two kinds of responsibility are slightly different, though. When including traumatic historical events in a work of fiction, what worries me is the possibility of trivialising them; or worse still, exploiting them somehow to pump up the fiction itself, to make it seem more important or momentous. One or two critics felt I had done this with the IRA bombings in The Rotters’ Club, but they seemed to be in a minority. Most readers – including the many readers from Birmingham who have written to me, and who remember the events first hand – seem to think that I handled it properly, which is a great relief. My sense of responsibility when writing about B S Johnson was more straightforward, but also more rigorous – quite simply, it was a responsibility to the facts, a concern that I shouldn’t write anything that was untrue. Sometimes this was quite difficult when people were giving me radically different accounts of the same event.

The character of Michael Owen in What a Carve Up! seems in part a comic self-portrait, and at one point in the book he asserts that “we stand badly in need of novels…which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country”.  Do you think there is a particular difficulty for British novelists attempting to address contemporary politics?

If my memory is correct, Michael is in his early thirties when he makes that assertion: it’s the kind of thing I was saying in reviews at about the same age. Nowadays my frame of mind is not nearly so prescriptive, and I realise how foolish it is to seek to legislate for the kind of books that novelists should or shouldn’t be writing. I think that fictionalising myself (to a certain extent) as Michael in What a Carve Up!, and gently taking the piss out of him for his lofty opinions, was something of a turning point for me, and a very healthy thing for me to do. I realised at that point that I had been taking myself far too seriously. As for addressing contemporary politics in a novel – well, that’s always difficult, but no more so in Britain than in any other country, I wouldn’t have thought. I’ve done it twice – once in What a Carve Up!, which was written in 1991-93, about events which took place mainly between 1982-91, and again in The Closed Circle, which was written in 2003-4 about events which took place between 1999-2003. The general opinion I’ve picked up from both reviewers and readers is that I did it more successfully in What a Carve Up! That might be because Thatcherism, even at the time, was a readily identifiable ideology and the issues around it were relatively simple both to grasp and to form an attitude towards: with Mrs Thatcher, what you saw was what you got. Blairism I find much more slippery – I still don’t really understand what he or his government stands for, and that sense of disorientation – which is shared both by me and most of the characters in The Closed Circle – was perhaps more difficult to transform into satisfying fiction.

There seems an interesting blurring going on in your work in that, as a novelist, you use historical events to transform personal, autobiographical history, and yet, for the characters that populate your novels, their own personal histories are constantly being interrupted by historical events. Do you see fiction and history as being irrevocably linked? Is one in thrall to the other?

Of course they are irrevocably linked. I’m also fascinated by their shifting relationship to one another – a relationship that the novel, as a form, is uniquely qualified to explore. It seems to me that we all have a right to live our individual lives independent of larger, historical circumstance, but that history often doesn’t allow that: hence Lois’s engagement, for instance, being derailed by the pub bombing in The Rotters’ Club. The most extreme example comes in The Closed Circle when Paul Trotter has to choose whether he’s going to vote for or against the Iraq war, and eventually makes his decision on an entirely personal basis: because a vote for the war means his brother-in-law’s flat will fall vacant, and Paul can then use it to meet his mistress. That’s the moment when Paul’s political opportunism becomes most glaringly obvious, but it’s also a moment which humanises him (I hope) in a twisted sort of way: at least he is in touch with his feelings at last! The thrust of all my ‘political’ novels is to show people trying to get on with small, blameless lives without being flattened by the juggernaut of historical events over which they have no control.

You have spoken elsewhere of your need to describe B.S. Johnson’s novels at the beginning of his biography, so that you could write the rest of it knowing there would be a reasonable audience for the book.  How important is it for you to imagine an audience, or even an individual reader, when you write?

When I’m writing a novel, not at all. I don’t think about the reader’s age, gender, class, anything like that. You can’t second-guess these things, after all. With the Johnson biography, it was a purely practical thing: I didn’t want to write the book exclusively for an audience who already knew him, because that would make the readership so small. At the same time, I knew that very few of the book’s putative ‘general’ readers would make the effort to go through his entire oeuvre before reading my biography. I just thought there was no point in taking readers on a 400-page journey through Johnson’s creative struggles unless they were forearmed with at least a general sense of the nature and scope of what he’d written.

You created an audience for The Closed Circle by promising it as a sequel to The Rotter’s Club before you had written it. How did you find this sense of expectation impacted on the process of writing The Closed Circle?

It probably made me over-confident. Because The Rotters’ Club had had such a warm reception from reviewers and readers alike, I assumed there was already an inbuilt enthusiasm and sense of expectation for the new book. This turned out to be false optimism as (in this country at least) The Closed Circle has so far sold only about half as many copies as The Rotters’ Club. I thought I had written The Rotters’ Club so that it was full of obvious loose ends which readers would be curious to see resolved; in fact they didn’t read it like that at all, they saw it as a sort of self-contained nostalgia piece about the 1970s and don’t seem to have been particularly interested in following the characters through to middle-age. Of course I’m disappointed about this, because to my mind the two books form one long continuous novel which many readers now just seem to have abandoned in the middle.

What impact did your early reviewing have on your novel-writing? Has it made you more or less sensitive to reviews of your own work?

I can’t really see that my early reviewing had much of an impact on my novel-writing: I regard the two as completely independent activities. I suppose when I was doing a lot of reviewing, I had a good sense of what was ‘out there’ on the British literary scene, and that might have had a small part to play in inspiring me to write What a Carve Up! It would be too cynical to say that I saw a gap in the market, but I was aware that there hadn’t been too many big, ambitious novels yet about the Thatcherite revolution, and perhaps that made me more inclined to attempt one – it added a little extra spur, maybe, to what was already a strong creative impulse. I think having written a fair number of negative and frankly ungenerous reviews myself, in those early days, has probably made me less sensitive to reviews of my own work. (Although you also get less sensitive with age, I’m sure.) On at least two occasions I’ve been impressed by the grace and good humour with which people have spoken to me after I’ve been highly critical of their work in print; and this is turn has inspired me to try and behave in the same way when it happens to me.

You have mentioned the huge influence Henry Fielding had on your writing when you were completing your Ph.D on Tom Jones, both in terms of style and narrative architecture. Did anything appeal to you about Fielding as a biographical subject, or a public figure?

Not as a biographical subject. There are already too many fine biographies of him, and I’m not an eighteenth-century scholar, so I don’t think I would be up to the research. He does still intrigue me as a public figure, though, and as a possible subject for fictionalising or dramatisation.

Fielding argues in Tom Jones that, “Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are. From this complaisance the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them.” Would you agree with him?

I think that nowadays exactly the opposite is true. Far from having a ‘dictatorial power’, most critics (I am talking now about newspaper and magazine reviewers) have no influence at all. Reviews can neither make nor break a book. My experience of talking to readers is that they regard the books pages of national newspapers with total scepticism, as an entirely insular, inward-looking forum for back-scratching and score-settling. The same goes for the pundits who give their opinions every Friday night on BBC 2’s Newsnight Review. We live in an entirely anti-elitist age where the notion of individuals having any particular expertise, by virtue of, say, experience or education, in the area of judging fiction is dismissed out of hand. People buy books on the recommendations of friends, or their book group, or daytime TV personalities who pose no threat because they do not pretend to talk about books from any other perspective than that of the Ordinary Joe. Essentially, the public has decided that the British reviewing and prize-giving establishment does not know what it’s talking about. In the academy, of course, it may be different. Maybe there is still an establishment there which wields a ‘dictatorial power’ over what students are allowed to read and study.

In Modern British Fiction 1950-2000, Dominic Head argues that your introduction to B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates “convincingly reclaims The Unfortunates, not as a quirky effort of 60s experimentalism, but as a contribution to the enduring tradition of confessional writing, which resurfaces in the 1990s”. Are you aware of any impact your reviewing and biographical writing has had on popular perceptions of writers or actors?

Only in that the B S Johnson biography seems to have contributed to a minor revival of interest in him – which of course was the whole point of writing it. You can make a writer more visible in this way, I suppose; but you can’t really influence the way they are perceived – for the reasons given above, to do with the fact that readers now prefer to make up their own minds about things, and not take lectures from authority-figures.

Your novels have been, and continue to be, extremely successful critically and commercially in France. Do you have any sense of why this might be? Do you think different countries value particular aspects of your work?

I can only go on what I’m told by French journalists: that they feel rather starved of novels which feature strong narratives, humour, and engagement with contemporary social issues. (They tend to put this down to the baleful influence of the nouveau roman.) I’m perceived as ticking all of these boxes, so my books do go down pretty well over there. The warmest response I get from readers is in Italy, where The House of Sleep (which sometimes feels like a forgotten novel in the UK) is my most popular novel. That book has a great following there among readers in their teens and early twenties, I don’t know why. I’ve benefited from the perception that my books allow a window onto contemporay British society – in many European countries, especially France, Italy and Greece, I know that people read me for that reason, out of a kind of political curiosity. I prefer it when people are attracted to the literary qualities of the books, of course, but there’s no doubt that I’ve broken through in some countries because of that curiosity, so I shouldn’t undervalue it. The only place where it hasn’t really worked is America, where not many people seem to be curious about the world outside their own country at all.

In your biography, you suggest that B.S. Johnson might well have felt “just as isolated, and just as embattled, in today’s English literary culture as he did thirty years ago”. Do you have any thoughts on your own place in current literary climate in this respect?

Obviously I am not as oppositional figure as B S Johnson was, and for the last decade and a half I’ve been very lucky, with a fairly comfortable niche in British literary culture which has allowed me to write the books I’ve wanted to write, and support my family in the process. I think Johnson would only have felt isolated and embattled today if he had continued to cling rigidly to his theories: anyone insisting that high Joycean/Beckettian modernism is the only way forward for the British novel in 2006 is going to get short shrift from publishers and critics. In other ways the literary culture is far more diverse and open-minded than it was in his day: the big recent commercial successes of writers like Mark Haddon, DBC Pierre and Yann Martel suggest that we are actually living at a time when readers might be more receptive to an experiment like The Unfortunates than they were in 1969. On the other hand, any author without consistently good sales figures could be excused for feeling embattled nowadays: what has changed since the 1960s (and indeed since the mid-1990s) is the penetration of free market economics into publishing, with the concomitant relentless pressure on books to perform well in sales terms. In that sense we are all having to look constantly over our shoulders, with a B S Johnsonian-sense of insecurity and vulnerability.

You have said that your biography of B.S. Johnson perhaps tells its readers more about you than him. Do you consider the work more autobiographical than your novels? Do you think autobiography and fiction are possible to separate?

Oh, so you’ve saved the biggest and most difficult question until last, just when I’m tired from answering all the others. Briefly, then – no, I don’t consider the B S Johnson book more autobiographical than my novels. It tells you quite a lot about my views on writing and publishing, but the novels tell you more about me emotionally. As for whether you can separate autobiography and fiction, that varies from writer to writer. In my case, I don’t think you can. Although they are often different in their surface detail, most of my books tell similar emotional narratives and feature similar protagonists. Until recently, I thought that the novel I’m working on at the moment was radically different from everything I’d done before. But one day, something made me see it from a new angle and I realised that it has huge amounts in common with The House of Sleep, for instance, even though the tone and methodology are completely different. We are condemned (I am condemned) to explore and revisit the same issues in our fiction, over and over, until … what? Until they are resolved, probably. At which point, we don’t need to write any more.

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